>If you believe this is the general reason, then you should invest in all these companies making 80+% profits and get the amazing returns.

I didn't say they were getting great returns. Although their returns are good (and if I could go back in time and invest like 20 years ago I could 100x my money), the fact is that although stuff is cheaper we (individuals and businesses) still can't buy more because money is worth less than it used to be.

>Well, there's 200ish of them that exist right now above zero. And guess what? Every single non-fiat currency has failed, since there are zero left. You can keep claiming otherwise but this is reality.

You can keep denying the reality that gold has much value, but you're wrong. It may not be the official currency anywhere, but it is worth a lot everywhere in the world. Furthermore, central banks hoard gold. If it was as worthless and detached from money as you propose, they would sell it all immediately. But they're buying instead. BRICS countries are launching a gold-backed currency any time now. Get your head out of the sand.

>Gold has always been far more volatile than goods, which is precisely the reason the world saw the incontrovertible evidence during the Great Depression, which is why all of the 200+ countries on the planet left it as a standard. If it were some magical better way, then surely at least one of the 200+ countries would do it and win, but it has been clear nearly a century what a bad idea it is.

Every country wants fiat because they can print it, plain and simple. The way these governments win is not by having a functional currency so much as by having something they can manipulate in their favor. Gold is not easy to manipulate because you can't print it. The avoidance of gold-backed money has nothing to do with "volatility" of gold. The supply of gold is steady, growing at perhaps 2% per year. There can be localized shortages of gold in a gold-based system that create volatility, but that is nothing compared to reckless printing of fiat. A responsibly managed fiat system could potentially be more stable than gold, but artificial manipulations of the money supply are not free and represent unfair enrichment or impoverishment of different players in the economy.

>Tying your economy growth to the rate you can dig up gold is also a reason that those thousands of years saw economic growth at a fraction of a percent. When mankind realized the stupidity of limiting growth in all areas to the growth in digging up gold, and detached the two, economic growth greatly increased. You cannot invest in new production, inventions, and goods, without having capital. Limiting capital, i.e., gold supply, results in lower growth.

You have really muddled things here. For thousands of years, debasement of currency and fiat currencies were also real threats. What really stimulated progress in the last 200 years was the discovery of steam power and oil. The Industrial Revolution. You can certainly invest in new innovations with a gold-based system, and that is indeed what happened. The Great Depression was caused by nothing other than reckless expansion of credit. Some people even think it was deliberately planned so that gold could be stolen by the government in the aftermath. I'm not saying gold is perfect or fiat absolutely can't work, but gold is real and it is the one thing that has truly lasted. Fiat currencies go to zero. Gold has not and will never go to zero, unless a solid gold asteroid hits the planet and we end up with an explosion in supply.